Tài liệu Departing Thoughts From an NIJ Director doc

I also think the funding that’s made this possible is very secure, in part because the political situation in this country is such that the Federal gov-ernment will always now be asked t

I’m proudest

of the fact

that when

people

around the

country say

that NIJ is

involved with

something,

everyone

knows it’s of

high quality

and has

met high

Departing Thoughts From

an NIJ Director

Departing Thoughts From

an NIJ Director

NIJ Director Jeremy Travis

recently announced that

he will be leaving the Institute after 5 ½ years to become

a Senior Fellow at the Urban Institute

in Washington, D.C On the

after-noon of February 18, Mr Travis

sat down to discuss his tenure

with esteemed criminologist Alfred

Blumstein, the J Erik Jonsson

University Professor of Urban Systems

and Operations Research at the

H John Heinz III School of Public

Policy and Management at Carnegie

Mellon University Professor

Blumstein is a former dean of the

Heinz School and is the Director

of the National Consortium on

Vio-lence Research What follows is an

excerpt of the conversation between

Mr Travis and Professor Blumstein.

AB:Jeremy, many of us are sorry

to learn that you’re leaving, after

one of the most impressive tenures

as NIJ director I think the world

outside is really impressed with

what’s happened and what’s been

accomplished What are you most

proud of?

JT:I’m most proud of establishing

NIJ’s place in the world as an

organization that’s committed to science, committed to independent research activities, and particularly committed to finding relationships that are productive between researchers and practitioners

AB:I think that’s widely recognized

as an important accomplishment

What’s your sense of how likely that transformation is to continue?

What are some of the threats you see to its continuing? And how do

we ensure that it will continue?

JT:Well, the good news is that at the local level we are seeing new relationships between researchers and practitioners and policymakers that can’t be stopped And those relationships are evolving and becoming a way of doing business that is seen as valuable in itself

AB: But NIJ did some “pump prim-ing” in this regard

JT:I think we’ve played a signifi-cant role in accelerating what may have been a naturally occurring phenomenon We made investments that brought research and police partners together Then we repli-cated that in the correctional world,

in the violence against women world, and in other areas as well

We’ve tried to foster a sense of com-fort between research and practice

so that each has something to teach the other I think NIJ has played a very valuable role—valuable beyond our dollars—in encouraging differ-ent ways of thinking on both sides

of the equation

AB: Different ways of both thinking and organizing

JT: and willingness to reexamine the core ways of doing business

That momentum cannot be stopped because it is of value to both parties

I also think the funding that’s made this possible is very secure, in part because the political situation in this country is such that the Federal gov-ernment will always now be asked

to do something about crime, and

we’ve been successful in asserting the principle that for each Federal crime policy initiative, money should be set aside to conduct research and evaluation

AB: Is that a principle reflected in statute that is going to continue, or

is it subject to change by a change

in administration?

JT: The set-aside principle is a prin-ciple that is now reflected in statute

Some modifications are now being proposed to make that clearer and establish the level of funding But the principle is there in statute So between a Democratic administra-tion and a Republican Congress, this

is now seen as the way that we do business And my hope for the longer term is that we will be able not only to conduct research that is tied to Federal initiatives, but also be able to conduct long-term research projects—that take 5 to 10 years—so

we can explore new areas of crime policy on behalf of the country For example, we have very little research underway on organized crime, on economic crimes, and on emerging issues, such as cybercrime Those require a long-term research agenda that will help define the research questions, the research methods, and the research opportunities But we need to be ahead of that curve rather than merely conducting research that is a parallel enterprise to the Federal crime initiatives

Maintaining

an Independent Research Program

AB: You mentioned that you’re proud of establishing NIJ as an organization that’s committed to independent research activities

What insulations are in place to keep the next Attorney General, the next President, and perhaps the next director of NIJ, from tearing down some of the strong protec-tions you’ve built-up to maintain

an independent research program?

Professor Alfred Blumstein interviews Jeremy Travis on

the occasion of Travis' departure from NIJ Photo: Jim

Johnson Photography.

JT: The best insulations we have

and have had for many years are the

two pillars of our statutory

autho-rization, which say, first, that the

decision-making authority of the

National Institute of Justice is the

sole authority of the director So I

have never had to consult with the

higher-ups about what grant to

award I’ve made those decisions

within this office And that’s a very

important principle, it’s a very

important legal protection, and

it’s a very important statement

Congress has made [to ensure]

an independent research program

within the Department of Justice

A second insulation is the final

decision-making authority the NIJ

director has to publish Our

publi-cations are ours alone They receive

the scientific protections of peer

review and editing to make sure that

they’re accessible to the field, but the

final decision to publish is reserved

to the NIJ director

AB: Now, to the extent that a new

director is, let’s say, an agent of a

political Attorney General—that

independence is thereby inherently

undermined What happens then?

JT:Two things One is we have built

a very strong professional staff that,

to their core, believes in these

val-ues Secondly, we’ve built a strong

network outside of the Institute—

researchers and practitioners and

policymakers, and members of

Congress alike—that believes in

these principles

AB:And that institutional network

includes, for example, the National

Academy of Sciences Committee on

Law and Justice and what others?

JT:I think all the professional

asso-ciations, the universities, and the

high-quality research

organiza-tions—they have an interest in the

independence of the research

prod-uct of their faculty and staff We all

have the same interest, which is to

ensure that the research process is

respected for its independence and its integrity And to the extent that est is shared outside of NIJ, our inter-nal ability to advance with indepen-dence and integrity is strengthened

NIJ’s Contribution

to Research on Violence, Policing, and Sentencing and Corrections

AB:We’ve been talking about some

of the organizational issues that have been important, and they

really are important But would

you comment on substantive areas that you think have been important developments?

JT: Well, I think our research on violence has been a valuable contri-bution to our understanding and to improving practice—and that’s in the areas of family violence, homi-cides generally, and gun violence In those three areas, we’ve made con-tributions that will help to focus and localize some of the practitioner and policy responses in ways that will improve practice and already have For example, the work we did

in Boston with the Boston Gun Pro-ject.1That relatively small research grant to Harvard University’s John

F Kennedy School of Government has helped us to think about juve-nile violence in very innovative, very valuable ways

Secondly, I think the research portfolio on policing will define a new era of policing We have done research on organizational change that was never possible before because it’s very expensive research

We’re asking the question, ‘What does it mean to change the culture

of an organization toward a new way of doing business?’

AB: Would you say something about those projects?

JT:We’ve been able to support longitudinal studies of police

departments as the unit of analysis

in six jurisdictions for, it will be ulti-mately 6 to 10 years We’re not just studying policing, we’re studying the police, we’re studying the police organization.2

And I think of particular impor-tance has been the growth in our research and policy engagement on the issues of sentencing and correc-tions When I came to NIJ in 1994,

I was stunned to learn that this research organization was funding very little on what is the major policy challenge of our generation, which is sentencing and corrections

AB: The whole incarceration issue

JT: Right And so we have funded

a very robust research portfolio on those issues, trying to understand the impact of various sentencing options, to look at alternative sen-tencing policies, to look at prison management

AB:In that realm, one of the impor-tant areas where NIJ made invest-ments in the past was in crime-control theory, with particular emphasis on deterrence and inca-pacitation One of the important contributions was, for example, the RAND inmate survey, which investi-gated individual offending rates or the distribution of lambda We don’t have anything more recent than a survey that was done more than

20 years ago.3

JT: I will identify this as a major regret We wanted to be able to update the lambda estimates, in part because they provide the basis for so much policy debate and dis-cussion and because they have been critiqued by scholars as being inade-quate or limited I think that in the next 5 years, the Institute will be able to mount a major initiative

to reestimate the rates of offending

AB:The crime-control theory pro-gram represented the development

of an important knowledge base

that was a step removed from the

issues of sentencing and corrections,

but it provided an important input

to the policy process The lambda

estimates were only a part of that

That level of fundamental research—

and it’s clearly applied research, but

it’s not directly applied to practice—

should be an important component

of the research agenda for NIJ

JT: We identified this internally as

an initiative we wanted to

under-take, but with the budget cutback

we had this past year particularly, we

were not able to even get it started

With the increased funds we’ve

asked for in the 2001 budget and

with the greater discretion we’ve also

asked for, this is high on our list

NIJ’s Growing Budget

AB:One of the characteristics of

your administration has been an

impressive growth in the gross

bud-get of NIJ Tell me something about

that growth (See “Sources of NIJ

Funds, in Millions, FY 1994–1999.”)

JT: The Institute’s budget has

grown enormously

AB: From what to what?

JT: when I arrived it was about

$24 million a year The President’s

budget for 2001 requests over $200

million That growth has come in

a number of areas and through a

number of funding mechanisms

And the growth, importantly, has

been for a variety of scientific efforts

and, increasingly, in the physical

sciences and forensic sciences Some

of our most exciting work is about

the DNA issue and technology

developments that are very

impor-tant to the field.4

AB: What portion of the $200

million goes into that?

JT: Next year it’ll be over half

AB: So it’s over $100 million

JT:Right It’s $125 million So the

growth in the Institute’s budget has,

in part, tracked the needs of the field The work that we’ve done in the violence against women area, for example—there’s clearly a strong consensus within the country that

we need to pay more attention to the phenomenon of family violence

That national interest has made one small area of our portfolio increase

by about 10 times

Some of the growth has been by virtue of our partnerships with our colleague offices within the Department of Justice So the $40 million we’ve invested in policing research has been by virtue of our partnership with the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services And that has been important to help inform the changes in policing

A lot of the growth also is in what

I call research infrastructure For example, the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (ADAM) program,5 which will ultimately grow to a

$20-million-a-year program from a

$2-million-a-year program when I arrived, is an investment in research infrastructure so that we can under-stand the world of offending at the local level

Similarly, the development of an international program is a type of infrastructure It’s a way of thinking about research opportunities in the global criminal justice community that we didn’t think about 5 years ago

Another example is the develop-ment of our network of technology centers,6which bring science and technology to the field to work on police and other criminal justice issues, to help people think about new technologies that address new and old problems So infrastructure has been very important, and that’s

a role that NIJ uniquely can play

in helping to advance practice and science

Sources of NIJ Funds, in Millions, FY 1994–1999

Congressional Appropriation

Transfers From Other Agencies

Transfers From Crime Act Program Offices

Total Funds

$23

$27

$30

$30

$41

$46

$0.5

$11.1 17.1

$26.3

$34.5

$19.5

N/A $15.6

$51.9

$51.1

$48.6

$45.6

$23.5

$53.7

$99

$100.6

$115.9

$141.5

160

1994 1995

1996 1997

1998 1999

Source: Building Knowledge about Crime and Justice, The 2000 Research Prospectus

of the National Institute of Justice, November 1999, NCJ 178903.

Funding for a

Long-Term Research

Agenda

AB: Even when NIJ’s budget

was $25 million, a lot of that was

devoted to infrastructure, like the

National Criminal Justice Reference

Service What was the size of the

discretionary research program

then, and how has that grown or

shrunk today?7

JT: Our truly discretionary research

program, which is that amount of

money left over from our ongoing

initiatives, and not including the

special research programs like that

on policing

AB: which have their own

discre-tionary quality because they’re

targeted

JT: The decisions are discretionary.

But our truly discretionary budget

for substantive research is about

$3 million a year

AB:It’s still as low as $3 million a

year

JT: This year, because our budget

was reduced, our discretionary

bud-get was reduced, and because we

had earmarks against our

discre-tionary budget, this year it will be

even less—about $2 million

AB: And that’s a ludicrous number

in view of the $100 to $200 billion

the Nation spends on crime and

justice

JT:Right If you were to apply the

industry formula and say that we

should have a 5-percent research

and development budget against

that $100 billion, we would be able

to do a lot more research, and good

for the country, I think But it still

has been a time of enormous

growth, and other science agencies

have also experienced growth So

this has been a good time for

sci-ence in the Federal sphere, and we

have lots of reasons to be very

grate-ful for the support we’ve gotten The

President’s budget this year, the pro-posed budget for 2001, requests a

1-percent setaside of the entire OJP

budget to come to NIJ for research

AB: for discretionary research

JT:Yes, 1 percent of the entire

budget of $4 billion

AB: so that would be $40 million

JT: $40 million for a research budget that is cutting-edge, that is long-term, that addresses issues that are not now within the other fund-ing streams

AB:Is this a setaside in addition to whatever setasides come in the other streams?

JT:Yes With a 1-percent setaside,

we would be able to tackle things like organized crime, economic crime, estimates of offending, and a list of unmet research priorities Practition-ers and communities want to know about these crime phenomena, but

we can’t meet their research agenda

A 1-percent setaside would be more than growth It would give us the ability to define a long-term research agenda Take, for example, the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods.8

Because of the ground-breaking work done in that study, we have opportunities to learn a lot more about what happens

at the community level We intend to

do some of that kind of investigation through our COMPASS initiative9 and others But imagine a world in which we could mount a number

of research sites around the country where we were simultaneously asking about informal social control and social capital We’d be able to look

at the variety of experiences that Americans have with crime

Connecting Research

to Practice

AB: One of the issues that is always of concern is the notion that research should generate new

insights, new information, new methods that get translated into action Would you say that NIJ’s research has an effective and continuing link to practice?

JT: We have a number of stellar examples of initiatives that closely link research and practice

AB: What are some of those?

JT: We have the Breaking the Cycle10

initiative, which is testing a hypothesis regarding the impact of

a systemwide use of drug treatment and other interventions to reduce drug use In another demonstration project, we are asking what would happen if judges became involved

in managing interventions and sanctions for batterers to try to reduce violence within intimate relationships.11

AB:Are these evaluations of ongo-ing projects?

JT:No These projects are designed

to test research-based hypotheses That’s different from evaluating something that’s already underway

In these types of approaches, we explicitly set out to use our research knowledge to test a very different way of doing business The program

is designed to yield research find-ings

I think the other stellar example of the relationship between research and practice is the effort to apply the lessons learned from the Boston Gun Project—to put researchers and practitioners into very different relationships in which the research partners help define the strategies for intervention in an iterative, ongoing, symbiotic way, hand-in-hand with a practitioner team that

is trying different approaches We’ve now done this in five other cities, and we have different research part-ners in all of them.12

AB: And each city is doing it differ-ently based on its own ideas

JT: own data, own definition of

what the crime problem is, their

own willingness to collaborate with

each other and combine resources

But the researcher is now doing

not only analytical work but also is

saying, ‘Well, let’s think about the

theoretical implications of trying

strategy A versus strategy B.’

AB:And what are some of the

theo-retical issues that have emerged? I

have a sense that there were a

num-ber of principles: One, collaboration

across the agencies; two, priority

setting and communication of

those priorities

JT:What we’re learning from

Boston and its offspring are some

very important lessons on

deter-rence What are the governmental—

and private—actions that have

impacts on the behaviors of young

people, such that we have some

understanding of them in

deter-rence theory?

AB: What makes that particularly

intriguing is that almost all of

deter-rence research has focused on some

aggregate measures of sanction

policy

JT:Exactly And in Boston and its

offspring, we are saying that to deter

Johnny from engaging in criminal

behavior, you have to speak to

Johnny about his behavior You have to speak to his peer group.

You have to speak to his mother.

AB:It demonstrates a necessity to communicate salient messages that are much closer to the audience whose behavior you’re trying to change, as opposed to enacting new legislation, for example

JT: The flip side of this is that we are also asking the very important

question, ‘What is the least we have

to do to achieve the highest deter-rent yield?’ Because there’s also the risk that, in terms of enforcement or controlling of behavior, we do more than is necessary to get the desired outcome

AB: Not only the least we have to

do, but what is the optimum we have to do In many cases, if we try

to do more than that, we come out being counterproductive because we’re diminishing the saliency of the message

JT:To place a researcher in an envi-ronment like that, an envienvi-ronment that is in essence a natural labora-tory, and give the researchers the ability to ask questions and get feed-back about behavioral changes from specific interventions, that is a rela-tionship between research and prac-tice that we’ve never seen before

The Impact of Research on Drug Policy

AB:Drug treatment is another area where research has made a major impact on policy and practice

Could you say something about that? Is it in part through drug courts?

JT:In part But I think it’s broader than that I think NIJ also is making contributions to the national discus-sion about drug policy because we are able to describe drug use and drug markets and drug users in ways that we couldn’t before

AB:Predominantly through ADAM

JT: predominantly through ADAM I think that’s our signature contribution But secondly, we have been able to test drug interventions

in ways that have significant impli-cations for policy Particularly in the area of drug courts, but also in the areas of in-prison drug treatment and postrelease drug testing and treatment We are looking at the efficacy of a mix of sanctions—

imprisonment, testing, treatment, family support—the relationship between carrots and sticks and how they can be finely calibrated

to change behavior

AB: Carrots and sticks in the sense

of support and threats

JT: Right The behaviors we want

to change are both drug-using behavior and other antisocial behav-iors Half to three-quarters of the criminal justice population has a history of drug use Given the nexus between drug use and the criminal justice population, NIJ’s contribu-tion of a solid research base on how criminal justice involvement can

be used to reduce drug use—

through drug courts or some sort

of judicial intervention involving drug treatment—that’s a real accomplishment

To place researchers in an environment

an environment that is in essence a natural

laboratory, and give them the ability

to ask questions and get feedback about

behavioral changes from specific interventions,

that is a relationship between research and

practice that we’ve never seen before.

AB: You mentioned the regret about

being unable to update the RAND

study Are there other things you

didn’t accomplish that you wish

you had?

JT: When I leave a job there’s

always a short list There are so

many things I hope get carried out—

COMPASS, reentry courts,13

the 1-percent setaside, the international

program They are not yet done,

but I think they’re pretty strong

seedlings I wish we had made our

argument earlier about the need for

a 1-percent setaside for a long-term

research agenda in areas not covered

by our other setasides And I wish I

could be here after OJP is

reorga-nized14

(something I hope will hap-pen) because I think the relationship

between the research function and

the program development function

in OJP will be even stronger

A Future at the Urban

Institute

AB: You’re now off to a program at

the Urban Institute Could you tell

us something about your plans there

and what issues you expect to

pur-sue at the Urban Institute?

JT: Well, I’m very fortunate to

be joining a research organization

with a wonderful, rich tradition

and history that is interested in

asking me to help them build their

research program on crime and

justice issues and to increase the

policy engagement on those issues

And so, in some ways, I’ll be

contin-uing to think about things that I

care about passionately in a

differ-ent setting

My personal agenda is to focus

thinking on the issues of crime and

justice when seen in the community

context I’m really committed to

looking at these as being localized

issues where a number of

policy-makers and community groups

and agencies of the criminal justice

system have roles to play in

produc-ing communities that are safer and more just I think the Urban Institute, because of its work on those issues in urban settings, with its family focus, education focus, and welfare policy focus, is a place where I can do that

NIJ’s New Public Image

AB:Which of your accomplish-ments at NIJ has given you the most personal satisfaction?

JT:I’m proudest of the fact that when people around the country say that NIJ is involved with something, everyone knows it’s of high quality and has met high standards

AB: So it’s the standing in the [criminal justice] community, both the practitioner community and the research community

JT:And the community The public has an understanding of NIJ that it didn’t have before The mission and the value of the Institute are the strongest they’ve ever been For example, on one day recently, NIJ was on the news because the Attorney General had told Congress that she was asking us to develop a broad agenda on cybercrime to help respond to this new area of crime

And on the same day, a national newspaper was reporting that we were developing a new initiative

on managing the reentry of prison-ers back to the community to in-crease the social functioning of those offenders and the overall safety of those communities That was a great day

NCJ 181730 Notes

1 The Boston Gun Project enlisted the community and

implement-ed problem-solving policing to solve the city’s juvenile homicide problem The Project was com-pleted in two phases—an attack

on the drug market that supplied guns to youths and an outreach program for area gangs to set standards for acceptable behav-ior If these standards were vio-lated, community police and prosecutors took every available legal action against the offender See Kennedy, David, “Pulling Levers: Getting Deterrence

Right,” NIJ Journal (July 1998,

JR 000263)

2 The studies are examining polic-ing strategies and organizations

in Chicago and Joliet/Aurora, Illinois; Dallas, Texas; Madison, Wisconsin; Tempe, Arizona; and Washington, D.C Findings will be released in late 2000

3 For more information, see Chaiken, Jan M., and Marcia R

Chaiken, Varieties of Criminal Behavior, Los Angeles: RAND

Corporation, August 1982; and Blumstein, Alfred, Jacqueline Cohen, Jeffery A Roth, and

Christy A Visher, Criminal Careers and “Career Criminals,”

volume II, Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1986

4 The purpose of the National Commission on the Future of DNA Evidence is to provide the Attorney General with rec-ommendations on the use of cur-rent and future DNA methods, applications and technologies in the operation of the criminal justice system, from the crime scene to the courtroom For more information, visit the Commission’s Web page at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/dna For more information about NIJ's overall technology research and development activities, visit http://www.nlectc.org

5 The Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (ADAM) program

is an NIJ-funded project that tracks drug use trends among booked arrestees in urban areas

of the United States Currently

operating in 35 sites, ADAM is

the only national drug data

pro-ject using drug testing techniques

on arrestees For more

informa-tion, visit the program’s Web site

at http://www.adam-nij.net

6 The National Law Enforcement

and Corrections Technology

Centers (NLECTC) are

com-posed of a national center, four

regional centers, and four special

offices located throughout the

country Their mission is to be a

comprehensive source of product

and technology information For

more information, visit the

program’s Web site at

http://www.nlectc.org

7 The Institute’s discretionary

bud-get is the portion of the budbud-get

that is not already obligated

either by Congress through

earmarks or by NIJ through

its ongoing initiatives

8 The Project on Human

Develop-ment in Chicago Neighborhoods

began in 1988 with funding from

the John D and Catherine T

MacArthur Foundation, NIJ, the

National Institute of Mental

Health, the U.S Department

of Education, and the

Admin-istration for Children, Youth and

Families It is an interdisciplinary

study investigating the factors

that contribute to juvenile and

adult crime, drug abuse, and

vio-lence To do this, the Project has

combined two studies: A

thor-ough examination of Chicago’s

neighborhoods and a

longitudi-nal study of 6,000 area youth

The researchers are looking at the

different circumstances (such as

child care and exposure to

vio-lence) in each youth’s (or child’s)

life and how these factors affect

criminal outcomes For more

information, visit its Web site at

http://phdcn.harvard.edu

9 Community Mapping, Planning,

and Analysis for Safety Strategies,

or COMPASS, is an NIJ and U.S

Department of Justice initiative

to develop and implement a group of crime data systems in select U.S jurisdictions Each sys-tem will allow better evaluation

of the crime problems facing a particular site It is currently in its developmental stage at a pilot site in Seattle, Washington

10 Breaking the Cycle is an NIJ-initiated program that is testing the hypothesis that arrestee drug testing and mandatory drug abuse treatment, among other interventions, for offenders with histories of drug abuse will decrease future substance abuse and criminal activity The program currently is in place in three adult and two juvenile U.S

court systems For more infor-mation, see “Building Knowledge About Crime and Justice,”

National Institute of Justice Research Prospectus, 2000,

Washington, D.C.: U.S Depart-ment of Justice, National Institute of Justice, November

1999 (NCJ 178903), pages 6–7, and Harrell, Adele, Foster Cook, and John Carver, “Breaking the Cycle of Drug Abuse in

Birming-ham,” NIJ Journal (July 1998,

JR 000236)

11 The Judicial Oversight Demon-stration Program is coordinating community responses to domes-tic violence in three communities

by holding offenders accountable through frequent judicial over-sight, graduated sanctions, provi-sion of batterer intervention pro-grams, and intensive supervision

The demonstration is jointly funded by the Violence Against Women Office and the National Institute of Justice

12 The Strategic Approaches to Community Safety Initiative (SACSI) is taking place in five U.S cities—Indianapolis, Indiana; Memphis, Tennessee;

New Haven, Connecticut;

Portland, Oregon; and Winston-Salem, North Carolina The

Initiative’s goal is to promote collaborative efforts between researchers and local, State, and Federal crime agencies to help identify and solve community crime problems This is to be accomplished through crime data retrieval and analysis to inform the design and implementation

of strategies to combat, prevent, and reduce crime trends For more information, see Coleman, Veronica, Walter C Holton, Jr., Kristine Olson, Stephen C

Robinson, and Judith Stewart,

“Using Knowledge and

Team-work to Reduce Crime,” NIJ Journal (October 1999,

JR 000241)

13 Reentry courts are court systems that manage, through the use of graduated sanctions and positive reinforcement, the release of prisoners into the community

These courts also use additional resources to provide a smoother reentry into society, with the goal that this will lower recidivism rates among offenders The Office of Justice Programs is managing a demonstration ini-tiative involving reentry in nine States: California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Iowa, Ken-tucky, New York, Ohio, and West Virginia

14 Congress has asked OJP to reorganize in order to improve service delivery to the criminal justice field The plan will create subject matter-based program offices, an Office of Grants Management/State Desks, and an Information Central Office to provide “one-stop shopping” for information about grants, train-ing, and conferences A central feature of the reorganization would create a unified research program in NIJ More informa-tion about the restructuring pro-posal is available from OJP’s Office of Congressional and Public Affairs at 202–307–0703